In large building complexes such as hospitals or offices, it is frequently necessary to transfer documents and other articles from one department to another and delays are often experienced in the transfer of such articles. An easily seen example of this is a polyclinic. The conventional operating procedure is that after a patient has registered, he or she must wait outside the doctor's consultation room for examination while, in the meantime, staff at registration desk pass the patient's file to the doctor. The patient therefore has to wait for a long time before examination. Similarly, if it is necessary for an inspection to be made during diagnosis, much time is wasted waiting for the inspection report. Similar delays can occur when sending a prescription to the medicine room for medicines and when returning files to the file room. The transmission of documents between the various departments is time consuming and if performed manually takes up a lot of man hours decreasing efficiency and increasing operating costs of the hospital, business or other enterprise.
It has previously been proposed to improve productivity through the use of a pneumatic conveyor system for the transfer of documents and like articles between departments. However, with such a system, the documents have to be scrolled and put into a small cylindrical container and thich and hard documents cannot be scrolled for this purpose so that this system is not popular.
A further system has been proposed utilising a conveyor system which imitates a railway system and in which a conveyor rail is mounted on the ceiling of a building and along which cars for delivering documents are arranged to run. On receiving a predetermined signal, a car is arranged to travel along the conveyor rail to a certain station at which staff can take documents or other articles out of the car or put documents or other articles into the car. The car will then continue to travel along the conveyor rail to another station. Although this system overcomes the drawbacks of the pneumatic conveyor system, it still wastes a lot of space because the conveyor rail must descend from the ceilings to the stations and ascend from the stations back to the ceilings. Further, if the staff at any particular station forget to take out of or put into the car documents or other articles and leave the car unable to take instructions, following cars will be unable to enter that station and the whole system will be stopped.